What is a Domain Name?

A domain is the address of your cyberspace. A domain name is your identity on the internet. A domain name reveals so much about you and your website. It is important to get a right domain name to get a good first impression. If you want to create your presence felt on the internet, getting a domain name is perhaps the starting point. It helps you to gain so many options on the internet which can only follow once you have a domain registered under your name.

A domain is nothing but a website address on the internet. It refers to a unique name that identifies one or more computers that have access to the internet. It appears on the web site URL (Uniform Resource Locator). What companies like GoDaddy, BigRock, NameCheap and others provides a place for you to search and register domain names. Individuals, agencies and investors can buy domains from them with an availability factor defined crudely by the first come, first served basis. These domains become part of the International Domain Name System (DNS).

A domain name says a lot about who you are and what you do. For businesses especially, picking out the right domain name is often the starting point to building a successful online presence

Based on their extensions and the value they create in the time to come they can be classified into different categories of Top Level Domains (TLDs), country domains and others. We will study about those later in this section.

Get a clear picture of what domain is with the following example:

Protocol:

In information technology, a protocol is the special set of rules that end points in a telecommunication connection use when they communicate. Protocols specify interactions between the communicating entities.

A uniform set of rules that enable two devices to connect and transmit data to one another. Protocols determine how data are transmitted between computing devices and over networks. They define issues such as error control and data compression methods. The protocol determines the following: type of error checking to be used, data compression method (if any), how the sending device will indicate that it has finished a message and how the receiving device will indicate that it has received the message. Internet protocols include TCP/IP (Transfer Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), FTP (File Transfer Protocol), and SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol).

Sub-Domain:

A subdomain is a domain that is part of a top-level domain. For example, example.com is a top-level domain andstore.example.com is a subdomain.